user
Seumas
<!--I'm an engineer for a large company that is known for it's UNIX operating system, high-end servers and Java. Under this same employer, I also worked within the alliance that we had with another company that was known for its web browser and beer bashes (now known as a division of AOL TimeWarner). My stock options strike prices average 44.00 points while the current trading price is around <a href="http://quote.fool.com/news/symbolnews.asp?Symbols=SUNW">3.00</a>. Whee!<p>
Whatever programming knowledge and ability I have (and yes, it is limited) has been self-taught. I try to help others where I can and seek help where I need it.<p>
My current project is a replacement for the current software which I've run on my main website since 1998 (<a href="http://gothicauctions.com">gothicauctions.com</a>). It's a full-featured auction server package with a built-in FAQ management system, news update system, messaging forums, unique feedback/rating system, accounting system, administration functions, user-set filters, image hosting and a ton of other features. It's written in perl (function-based for now, OO later) and uses a PostgreSQL backend.<p>
Places where I am looking for specific improvement is my knowledge and comprehension of general programming practices and theories (not having a formal education, I am ignorant in many of the formalities) and OOP.<p>
My computer-related timeline:<br>
<ul>
<li> 1983-ish, (6 years old): Brief encounter with a friend's Lisa. Played pong a couple times. That's it.
<li> 1984-ish, (7 years old): Brief experience with an old VIC-20. Played some Rat-Race, Robotron 2084 and Joust. First experience writing a little BASIC. Very little, since I had no documentation.
<li> 1989 (12 years old): Parents got a 80386. It mostly sat in a corner and nobody used it. I wasn't allowed to use it because it was considered a "fun toy", like television.
<li> 1992 (15 years old): I learned a little bit of Pascal and wrote a graphical slot-machine program on the cheap-ass circa-1984 Mac's at school.
<li> 1994 (17 years old): The first time I ever had my own computer and was actually able to use a computer more than once every few months. Sold my entire book and comic book collections to buy a cheap 286 w/ 10mb drive and green monochrome monitor. Refurbished it on my own, put an add in the paper, sold it for double what I paid. Used that to buy an 80386 with 20mb drive and CGA monitor. Started my own multi-line BBS running various door games on Random Access BBS Software (after playing with RA, MBBS/Wordgroups, Renegade, Wildcat and a dozen others).
<li> 1996 (19 years old): My first real job. Spent the first couple checks on an AMD K6-2 which I built myself (I've never bought prebuilts).
<li> 1998 (21 years old): My first real tech job, doing support for Netscape, back before AOL took us over. Had put together a couple more machines for myself by this time, as I periodically upgraded. Was introduced to linux and perl by friends. Started running my own auction site at the end of the year, using my budding Perl knowledge.
<li> 2000 (23 years old): Hired by Sun Microsystems as a software engineer in their new softare division, working on projects like iPlanet Messaging Server and Calendar Server.
<li> 2003 (26 years old): Still going . . . Currently have a 15" TiBook, Dell Lattitude PC laptop, dual AMD 1U rackmount server, 1ghz AMD Athlon, 1.5ghz AMD Athlon, 800mhz AMD Athlon, 600mhz AMD Duron, 1.2ghz AMD Athlon, 1.5ghz P4, Ultra Sparc 10, Ultra Sparc 5 and my crown jewel - a 23" flat panel HD Apple Cinedisplay. :) Most of the boxes run Solaris or Linux (Debian). The Powerbook obviously runs OSX and there are a couple Win2k's for gaming.
</ul>
<hr>
Since so many have asked, here's some info about my site's setup:<p>
<strong>Features of the auction software:</strong><br>
(The software offers just about everything that eBay does and then some, such as full image hosting and editing for users. The below list is incredibly incomplete!).
<ul>
<li> Proxy bidding.
<li> Snatch-It (buynow).
<li> Regular and set-price auctions.
<li> Feedback system.
<li> Random feature auction system.
<li> Feedback ledger.
<li> Full user auction/bid management interface.
<li> Full featured forum software.
<li> FAQ/Help system software.
<li> Image uploading/hosting for auctions.
<li> User profile pages, with user photos.
<li> Full auction searching.
<li> Dynamic generation of feedback graphs (represents a user's various feedback scores in a graph).
<li> Full category management system.
<li> User-voting system allows users to vote to move auctions to appropriate categories.
<li> System to ban users below a specific feedback ratio (applied depending on number of previous transactions).
<li> Full admin system.
<li> An optional WYSIWYG HTML editor for auction descriptions and forum messages.
<li> User web-page hosting.
<li> Image editing capabilities for users, including watermarking, resizing, thumbnailing, adding borders, etc.
<li> An internal email system (lets users have web-based mailboxes that they can communicate with other users through).
<li> A fully customizable user-experience that lets users configure how many bids make an auction hot, how many posts make a topic hot, what currency to display auctions in, whether to use an advanced HTML generation interface, etc...
<li> Email validation system to verify whether or not a user's submitted email address is currently working.
<li> Dozens of other things that aren't on the top of my head at the moment . . .
</ul>
<strong>OS and software:</strong><br>
<ul>
<li> Debian (testing), 2.4.18 kernel.
<li> PostgreSQL 7x
<li> Apache 1.3x
<li> Perl 5.8
<li> Postfix
<li> qpopper
<li> Procmail
<li> Spamassassin
</ul>
<strong>Hardware:</strong><br>
<ul>
<li> 1U rackmount chassis
<li> Dual socket Tyan mobo
<li> Dual AMD 1800+ (1.5ghz) MP CPUs
<li> 2gb registered DDR RAM
<li> 3Ware hardware raid card, running RAID5 with 260gb of storage.
<li> T1 (with about 40gb going out per month).
</ul>
<strong>About the auction site itself:</strong><br>
<ul>
<li> Opened in 1998.
<li> 100% free. No membership, listing or other fees.
<li> No advertisements or banners.
<li> Funded entirely out of my pocket.
<li> 25,000+ members.
<li> Approximately 500,000 auctions since day one.
</ul>
<strong>Some of the CPAN modules I use:</strong><br>
(Thank you to each module's authors!)<br>
<ul>
<li> CGI
<li> DBI
<li> HTML::Template
<li> Net::SMTP
<li> Digest::MD5
<li> HTTP::BrowserDetect
<li> Image::Size
<li> Text::Bastardize
<li> GD
<li> GD::Graph::Data
<li> GD::Graph::pie
<li> Mail::CheckUser
<li> Lingua::Stem
<li> Data::Dumper
<li> Benchmark::Timer
<li> Unix::Syslog
<li> Finance::Currency::Convert
</ul>-->
2008-06-17 03:46:47
3199
358388
0
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Portland, OR
-8
80
on